says Ward. Since news is essentially a playlist
of items, video content could also be rendered
on-demand by way of the news menu.

This type of application still leaves the lion’sshare of content “baked in,” but it’s a taste ofOBB’s potential. “All TV will be like this in fu-ture,” says Ward. “As TV sets gain gesture ca-pability and force feedback control, it allowsnew types of interactivity to be brought into theliving room.”The audio element of OBB is more advanced.Here, each sound is treated as an object to add,remove, or push to the fore or background for in-teractivity, to manage bandwidth, processing ca-pacity, or for playback on lower fidelity devices.

Dolby’s Atmos object-based audio (a version
of its cinema system) is likely to be introduced
to consumers as part of a pay TV operator’s
4K/UHD package. Both BT Sport and Sky, the
broadcasters dueling it out with 4K live services
in the U.K., have commissioned their mobile facility providers to build-in Atmos recording gear.
Sources at these OBB providers suggest that a
switch-on could happen by this time next year.

Initially, a Dolby Atmos production would
allow additional user-selectable commentary
from a neutral or team/fan perspective, different
languages, and a referee’s mic. It would also add
a more “at the stadium” feel to live events with
atmospheres from the PA system and crowd.

BT’s research teams are also exploring the
notion of responsive TV UI for red button interaction on the big screen and targeting 2020
as time for launch.

“Today we tend to send out something optimized for quite a small screen size, and if
you have a larger screen it is then scaled up,”
Brendan Hole, TV and content architect at BT,
told the IBC conference.

“We are asking what happens if the broad-cast stream is broken into objects so that thepreferences of the user can be taken into ac-count. You can add or remove stats in a sportsbroadcast for example, have viewer selectionof specific feeds. It could automatically take ac-count of the size and type of screen or it couldtake account of the fact I have a device in myhand so elements, like stats, could be deliveredto mobile instead of on the main screen.”Others investigating OBB include Eko Stu-dio ( go2sm.com/eko), formerly known as Inter-lude’s Treehouse. It offers an online editing suitethat lets users transform linear videos into inter-active videos so that the viewer can choose thedirection of the video.New York-based creative developer BrianChirls has developed Seriously.js ( go2sm.com/seriously), an open source JavaScript libraryfor complex video effects and compositing in aweb browser. Unlike traditional desktop tools,Seriously.js aims to render video in real time,combining the interactivity of the web with theaesthetic power of cinema. Though Seriously.jscurrently requires authors to write code, it istargeted at artists with beginner-level Java-Script skills so that the main limitation is cre-ative ability and knowledge of video rather thancoding ability.MIT put the groundwork into object-basedmedia a decade ago. It has since moved on toholographic video and display, although someof the same principles apply.“We are exploring holographic video as a me-dium for interactive telepresence,” says Bove.“Holosuite is an object-based system wherewe used a range-finding camera like MicrosoftKinect as a webcam to figure out which pixelsrepresent a person and which pixels the roomwith the ability to live stream content of peopleseparately from the backgrounds and with fullmotion parallax and stereoscopic rendering.”For content creators, object-based techniquesoffer new creative editorial opportunities. Theadvantages of shooting in an object-based way isthat media becomes easily reusable, and it canbe remixed to tell new stories or build futureresponsive experiences that don’t require anyre-engineering.

“Either we need to produce multiple different
versions of the same content which is highly expensive or we capture an object once and work
out how to render it,” says Page. “Ultimately, we
need to change the production methodology.
OBB as an ecosystem has barely begun.”

Adrian Pennington ( penningtonadrian@hotmail.com) is a
freelance writer based in London whose articles have appeared
in Financial Times, Broadcast, Futuremedia, and New Media
Age, among many others.

Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check
the masthead for other ways to contact us.